Monday, 31 March 2014

Black Glass

Imagine an ocean, a deep one. Imagine the water
is black and dark like North-Sea mud. Imagine things living in it,
thickly-knitted limbs that churn like a mower motor left tipped up and switched
on, cutting blindly in long grass. You can’t see the limbs, or the things to
which the limbs attach, but you can feel their movement in the thick black sea.
They regard you. They hate you. A hate so deep they tear frantically at their
own flesh in substitute for reaching yours.

Imagine the sea restrained by glass. Like the
walls of an aquarium built on titanic scale. You stand before the sea that
rises out of sight and curves to the horizon on each side. You can hear the
surface fretting up its waves in storm a distant mile above your head. The
glass holds everything back. Inside it you can see brief churnings of that
midnight high-pressure world, raging at your presence just beyond its reach.

Imagine that the glass is beautifully made.
Etched and engraved with perfect smiling forms. Beyond it, the black water,
but, when the light slants just-so across the pane, a field of translucent
harmony gleams, worked there on its surface by hands and minds that leap the
greatest human art. A genius casually employed that vaults with ease the best
that man has ever made. Crystal signature of thoughtless superiority. So
perfect are its fields and processions that when seen, even glimpsed in a
trickle of lateral light, you want to live there, with those frozen people,
inside the surface of that glass.

This is the Drow.

This is how much the Drow hate you.

This is how much they control that hate.

The offence of your existence cannot be easily
expressed.

The Drow are not angry that you live, they are
amazed. The knowledge of you stabs them in the flesh with every recollection and
event. Though they know it well, the wound of your existence will not close.
Each memory of you, each experience, all evidence of your continued being, is
like a knife twisting in the skin.

No other species could absorb such titanic
contempt and remain sane. They would be reduced to raving berserkers, living
only to kill, directly, the loathed enabler of their pain.

But the Drow are old, they know much of patience
and control. Nothing is done without intent.

They can speak of you. They can name you. They
can even see you in the flesh without breaking down. Some can even speak to you
as if you were real, as if your name was something other than the froth-flecked
gargling of a beast that dreamed it had a soul. As if your language did not
taste like shit on their tongue.

Everything that can be done is being done. The
situation is difficult, but there is time. There is always time. They must
endure, as they have for so long.

They know an hour will come when horrors fade.
When nothing else thinks or speaks upon the earth or in its veins. When even
the memory of any other monstrous thing
has been expunged. Then. Finally. There will be only Drow.

I've been reading OSR blogs for about two years now and have never really commented before now. This post compels me to tell you the following:

If you never make another post, I will still say yours is my favorite blog on the web. This post has made up for every Drizzt knock-off and other lukewarm interpretation of the Drow since their creation in '77.

Veins of the Earth Hardcopy

‘They've knocked it out of the park. Hit it for six. Got it in an arm bar in the first round. Pick your sport, pick your metaphor, doesn’t matter: the point is clear – so soon after _Fire on the Velvet Horizon_, Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess prove once again that something as unlikely as an RPG supplement can be art, of the most impressive kind. An amazing work.’ - China Mieville

FIRE ON THE VELVET HORIZON

"Superpositioning with strange panache, Velvet Horizon is an (outstanding) indie role-playing-game supplement, and an (outstanding) example of experimental quasi-/meta-/sur-/kata-fiction. Also a work of art. Easily one of my standout books of 2015." - China Mieville" Maybe my favourite thing we've made. If you like Scraps work click the pic.